Interviewed

Finally!  I had my second interview.  I'm not going to analyze it.  It went well.  And I should hear something by next week, which of course, may or may not actually happen.  I am a focused and floating ball of patience itself.  One thing I'm happy about is the fact that I could honestly tell my interviewer that I enjoyed working for the company and wanted to help it grow.

Anyway, I got a pizza in the oven (yum) and some diet sierra mist cranberry splash chilling in the fridge (yum!) so I'm a happy guy.  Laundry's in the dryer.  Got my jammy pants on.  Phew!  I'm all set.

Gameplay design continues to haunt my waking life. I need to break it down into smaller pieces or approach it from a different angle.  Hard to say.

Mele Kalikimaka.  That's easy to say.  At work, there's this version of the song that's way cooler than any version I can find.  Oh well.  Probably for the best, seeing as how I probably won't be able to stand the song by December 26.

All right.  I'll stop.  Gameplay design doesn't, uh, make itself happen.

Oh Gameplay Design, You Salty Whore

All the state lotteries have it right.  Bad odds against incomprehensible gains is the best way to take the blood out of the little people.  Sure, some idiot will become fabulously wealthy once or twice a week, but that won't change anything.  That wealth will be defrayed naturally, like a pillar of salt, sanded down by, well, sandy winds.

But on closer inspection, everything we do for fun is based on odds against gains.  Actually, everything we do for any reason is based on odds against gains (at least in this, what do they call it?, capitalistic world).  Odds against gains.

End of story: gameplay design is difficult.

Finally!  I have a second interview scheduled for a management position in a company I continue to appreciate more and more as I work there.  Sound false?  It's coz you don't work for the company I work for, fool.

This happened a couple days back, while I was leaving the store after my shift was done (names are changed to protect the innocent).  This whole conversation happened over, maybe, forty feet of walking and fifteen seconds, no lie:

Me: You're not out yet?
Dusty: I'm on my way.
Me: Darn straight!
Crusty: Bye Lightning J!
Me: Have a good night, Crusty!
Crusty: You too!
Me: See ya, Rascal!
Rascal: Hey, thanks for your help today.
Me: No sweat, man.  Have a great night, Tussle!
Tussle: Thank you!  You too!
Groove: Take it easy, LJ.
Me: Yeah, Groove, thanks. Get me that CD.  See you tomorrow!

I turned around and saw that a customer was following me out.

"You see how friendly we are?" I asked her.

"You guys are awesome!" she exclaimed.

And that's the point.

Board Game Story Design

Surprise!  Ever since I got back into designing my super-secret therefore super-awesome board game, the story has been getting a good 95% of the attention and time spent.  Don't get me wrong, gameplay design ideas are rattling away back there, way behind my eyeballs...  But I'm deeply engaged in writing out the background history of all the characters a player can play.

So tonight, I plan to devout my time to gameplay design.  It's going to be interesting to see if there's anything there...

In other news, I haven't seen my baby store crush in, like, at least a week or something.  News is going around that she's got a stomach bug.  Shoot.  I'd bring her the broth, warm and delicious.  And that's not even a euphemism.  An euphemism?  A euphemism.  I'm serious.  Mrs. Grass's coming up.

If there's anything in this world I fear, it's a stomach bug.  Last time I had one, I spent a night "sleeping" in the bathroom, promising anyone that might be listening "up there" (a.k.a. above 3 feet or so, with me slumped over the toilet or the bath or whatever) that I would never do anything bad again if I could just keep lukewarm water down long enough so I wouldn't die of dehydration.  I guess I lied, but I was under considerable duress after all.  Another reason to go to hell.  Thanks, stomach bug!

Now to devout my time to figuring out how to make an asymmetrical yet fair and engaging set of gameplay rules for my soon to be world-renowned board game.  Look out world, here it comes.  That is not a euphemism either.

Hooray for My Cousin!

So my cousin invited me over to her house for Thanksgiving.  She is awesome.  The food was awesome.  I got to bring back everything necessary for an awesome day-after-Thanksgiving sandwich.  Things are looking up.

Other than I'm supposed to be to work in 7 hours (give or take) and can't get to sleep.  Thus the (mildly) late post with little to no good material.  I have a better idea.  I'm going to work on designing my board game.  That might put me to sleep.  Goodnight.

Decadently Decadent Decadence

So HP Lovecraft is better than I feared.  Pretty good stuff.  However, At the Mountains of Madness should have been called Decadently at the Decadent Mountains of Madness and Decadence.  At ever corner, the art described in the book was always decadent.  Like, once a page, sometimes more.  It was ridiculous.  The word became a stab in my eyes each time I saw it after a while.

The real problem was he was never kind enough to clarify which way he meant to use the word.  "Decadent art" as in that it is self-indulgent and debauched or "decadent art" as in that it is decayed or debased?  That's kinda important, right?  No?  I'm sorry.  I forget that it's not cool to care about these things.  I'm not cool.

Moving along, I still haven't gotten that call for a second interview for a manager position.  Options are pouring in my mind for the next move.  What do I want to be when I grow up this time?  Policeman?  Construction worker?  Indian chief?  Leather guy?  So many choices.  Hm...

The Good Nephoo

My aunt broke her ankle recently.  I cringe just writing that.  Never broke a bone in my body.  Not sure how I've managed that.  Nonetheless, when I hear broken ankle, I can only assume a dry, scorching pain shoots up your body with that sort of thing.  Yuck.  Yuck!

So I bought her a card, $0.99, and wished her well.  I am the good nephoo.

Since the last post, it has become official.  I am Thanksgivingless this year.  I'm not too distraught.  Sometimes getting away from a tradition makes it better the next year.  I think I'll make myself something terribly unhealthy and eat as much of it as I can.  It will help me go to sleep early enough so working at 5:30am isn't so... nearly unachievable.

I just finished Voltaire's Candide.  It was okay.  What struck me most about it was how complacent everyone was with the power structure.  That is the work of a well-oiled censorship machine.  The characters of the book underwent unrelenting pain and bad luck.  A good portion was directed by the powers that be.  Never once did any character question the right of the tormentor's will.  It is quite different these days, at least in my corner of the world.

I am currently in the middle of H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness.  I've never read his works before.  It is not what I expected.  I cannot say that I am enjoying it much.  But it hasn't reached the point where I would abandon it.  It's only 130 pages.  I don't know though.  He seems to talk about horror instead of describing it.  I will reserve final judgment until I am done with the book an have a moment to stew over it.

I have started again at writing fiction.  Fiction is much more difficult to write than loose autobiographical garbage.  I'm thinking about using the blog occasionally to focus on fiction.

Goodbye Turkey

Relentless optimism wears me down, even when it comes from my own mouth.  So I'm going to say it:  going to work the day after Thanksgiving at 5:30 in the morning is the definition of, wait, let me try to remember what we settled on at the dogpark earlier...

Working on Black Friday at 5:30am is the definition of shitty as not real fuck.

Because "real fuck" is good! not bad.  See?  Okay, so this guy said that some dude on TV was "fake as fuck" but then got tangled up between the two ways that phrase can be applied.  After he finished mumbling about the difference between figurative "fuck" and "real fuck" I summarized and we moved on to more interesting talk...  You know, talk about the smell of the dentures of some other dude's aunt, and sleeping in a tree tent - pros and cons.

I love the dogpark.  Especially when the weather turns cold.  All you can do is suffer and talk while the pups play.  People suffering together can have wonderful conversations.

So Thanksgiving is probably out of the cards this year.  Sigh.  It's my favorite holiday too.  Oh well.  There could be worse things, like still working at my old job.

Holy crap, speaking about my old job, I haven't seen a single person from my old job in the store until this last week when three, THREE!, 3! different people came in.  I talked to two of them.  The third could go ahead and soak, in my opinion.  It was nice to see the other two.  I liked them and wish them well.

So, segues seem to be ruling this blog.  Perhaps some focus on organization needs to be implemented?  We'll see.  We'll see.

Anti-Commandeerering

So there's a cute little thing at work, no, not her, not today (though I saw her briefly, she was on her way out on my way in...), no, I'm talking about this thing managers do, just loading up your plate like any mother-in-law stereotype, but with projects instead of whatever food is equally stereotypical to the mother-in-law.  It's cute because it's a game, a cute game, where they know very well that it's impossible to get even a third of what they ask done, but with such a pile of things to do, there's no way that we'll be calling up managers and bothering them with bored and stupid questions.

The up side is that I never have to look for work to do.  That's awesome.  Makes the day fly by.  The down side is that everyone in my department is a highly trained anti-commandeerer.  Me included.  Case in point: I grabbed a pack-n-play and found out that it's the last one of its kind in the store and it's been discontinued.  Sweet!  I'll build it and knock the price down and get it out of my way.  Well.  Things come up, customer need customed and I pass the project along to the next guy.  Two days later, that same pack-n-play project was handed off again to me.  Lesson?  When ten things need done and nobody is really responsible for its completion, this kinda shit can go on ad absurdum.

Oh, and "anti-commandeerer" is just a dumb way to say a buck-passer.  I dumped two huge projects onto the person after me, but I only got told about one of them forty minutes before my shift ended...

This could be an awesome state of being if everyone in the department can agree that this is a cute game.  Unfortunately, that's not the case.  There's already sand in the vag.  People complaining about lack of communication, etc.  Whatever.  Do what you can and pass it along.  What a way to make a buck.

Oh, and yes, she was looking tasty today.  Damn.

Mmm That Damn Spark

Now, if you could just see this girl, you'd totally understand.  But man, I got it bad right now and it's messing with my head.  I feel like I'm too old for this garbage.  Guess not.  Dang.  But like I said, if you could just see her.  Mmm.

And because I am my own worst enemy when it comes to matters of attraction, there are conflicts and obstacles.  Of course, conflicts and obstacles be damned, but I can't claim ignorance of them.

I'm trying very hard not to turn this entry into a gush.  But oof.  She's fine.  My eyes go googly like ole cookie monster on a binge around her.  Very disorienting.  And I keep biting my tongue, not as a colloquialism to describe me holding back improper declarations, but because my tongue hangs out of my face and I close my mouth on it.

And we work so well together.  We work so well together.  It's amazing.  At the baby store, I mean.  We both work at the baby store.  And so she gets to see me at my stupidest.  I hope she finds it if not attractive, then at the very least cute.

Hope can also be so stupid.

And for pity's sake, this all just showed up last week.  I've been working with her for more than two months now and I didn't think too much about it until last Tuesday sometime during the day I looked at her and thought

GOOD GODDAMN!  SHE MUST BE MINE!

Maybe it was something she said or looked like or, yeah, even smelled like (let's be honest, it affects us).  I have no idea.  But the spark was sparked.  The switch was flipped (I first typed out "the flip was switched", which might be an even better phrase).  And now it's an avalanche in my poor brain.  I have this hard and fast policy about never dating coworkers that has served me well in my adult life.

It seems time for a rewrite.  More later.

Oneself

The only ways two sentient species can evolve concurrently are if the they are isolated from one another or codependent.  Otherwise, one or both will be eradicated. 

The expanses of space and time separate worlds from worlds enough for sentient species to evolve concurrently.  I hope we find some out there that were radio-happy as many years ago as they are light-years away...  Good luck to us.

The neanderthals didn't stand a chance, unless of course we weren't so different that we couldn't get it on with each other.  That's my hope.  Modern humans could use some more mixing and it seems like the stock ran out.  Oh well.

Dolphins?  Whales?  Chimps?  I don't know.  Breeding with them doesn't seem likely.  If they're the next best thing, I hope we don't screw it up too much for them.

Argh.  I apologize.  I've been trying to wrap my head around relativity lately, you know, for fun, if only to prove that I can.  And yes, there are many more interesting things to do in life, more worthwhile, mightier, greater, etc.  Everybody needs something to do when they poop.

I half-heard a weird snatch of smarty talk on NPR in the car.  I don't know what they said, but while driving and trying to descry the true form of spacetime and listening to NPR, a vision of a fast-moving photon circling about in a blur, making a shell like a gossamer sphere around, well, EVERYTHING else entered my mind.  The contents of the sphere were you, me, the earth, the sun and moon, the galaxy, the whole damn universe and, yeah, maybe more, you get the idea.

Light defines our spacetime.  Everything we see depends on light.  And such a narrow band of it!  Ugh.  Not only that, but it goes in a straight line that's bent by you and me.  And it only goes in a straight line because it traverses through time like us.  Argh.

More work to do on that.

I heard a good question again that I wasn't so ready to answer in this stupid state of mind.  She asked me who I was.

How is it that I can cut through space and time and still be me?  Am I just another thing that travels through the universe continually apologizing to itself that, while it changes, it really doesn't change that much?

I wonder.

Obama!

Hooray!

Time as a Dimension

In short, while we all wring our hands and cringe about who will be the next prez, more and more knowledge is being found.  If you don't support government funding of science, then you are a fuckwad asshole motherfucker dumbshit.  Fuck you.

Otherwise, please, enjoy this weird post, full, I'm sure, of inaccuracies...

Oh that rascally dimension Time, intertwined with such mundane and classically predictable dimensions such as up or down (yawn), to the sides (ho-hum) and out in front or back...

It happened when someone was smart enough to figure out that the most basic constant in this world (and any other) is neither death nor taxes (though those are pretty close to the top), but in fact the speed of light.  The speed of light is this existence's constant.  There are other constants.  And they're cute!  Like pi and e and slashed h plank's constant.  But what makes me shiver is a constant like the speed of light, which is politely called "c".

That "c", it's the cosmic hem.  It cannot be overcome (like what goes up, cough, must come down).  And to top it off, "c" when it's squared is the philosopher's stone between energy and mass.  You wanna make mass into energy? That's a tall order, but know when you do, the mass you have will be multiplied by the square of the speed of light before you get the equivalent energy.  Which means you shouldn't be anywhere near the transformation.

So the speed of light is cool.  And it means that the geometry of our little height, width and depth is pathetically unrepresentative in our world.

Time though, ugh.  What a bitch.  I can't say I understand it.  It progresses at different rates according to the gravitational field of where I am?  Really?  Time moves more quickly the farther I am from the center of the Earth?  Great.  What does that mean?  What does it mean to move through different rates of time?

It means that the geostationary satellites over our heads have to be "calibrated" for relativistic effects to let us know precisely where we are when we look at our phones to know.  And that's because the "gravity" up there is "less" than it is down here.  Really.

What the fuck does that mean?

There are smarter people out there that are suspending photons to motionlessness while doing the math.  There are those that claim to have found the particle equivalent to the field that bestows on us fat-asses the mass we so desperately need to lose.

I don't mean to add to the knowledge.  I guess I just had to get out what I knew, fearing a new administration that could hate science for the fact that it is also true.

Dark to Dark

Worked today, dark to dark.  It's that time of year again.  Should seem obvious, what with my voracious appetite for meaty, creamy soups.  Campbell's Chunky is holding me steady until I break out the crockpot and make myself a stew.  Or a chili.  Or baked mac n cheese.  Or a roast...  Damn.  It's kinda hard to write right now.

Marten's suggestion for a back pain simile "like a clamped tramp stamp" blows any of my musings out of the water.  I actually guffawed.  Hats off to you, sir.  Well done.

So, some somewhat disappointing news...  I haven't had that manager position interview at work yet, but I will tomorrow.  The last couple things that my boss's boss's boss said to me while we were setting up the time was:

Him: "Wow, I was told that you were an assistant manager of a grocery store."

Me: "Nope.  Supervisor in a union industrial environment."

Him: "Well, we should have the interview anyway.  See what sorts of paths we might take."

Me: "K."

So maybe baby retail management isn't in the cards.  Was kinda hoping it was.  Ah well.  I still have my writing to keep me going.  Writing like this.

Time to buy some cumin and, I don't know, northern beans...  garlic cloves...